Extra: SWARM, Uehara, and Maji Co. logo concept art

March 21st, 2018, 5:01 am

Author's Comments:

Extra (2 of 2)
We went through quite a lot of ideas for what the magical girls in Maria would be fighting, I think, before we settled on shape-shifting robots. The image in the top left is from a draft of chapter one that we were working on in October of 2011; as you can see we hadn't quite settled on the human-sized design yet. Also, they had built-in rocket launchers. And their arms turned into huge guns. The next image is closer to what we wound up with, but the face is more human-looking while the arms ... I don't know what's going on with the arms. I ought to know, since I drew them (well, one of them), but I don't.

Uehara! He was another character we came up with early on. I want to say he may have been the next one after Momiko, but I'm not sure. At that point, the Maria uniform was just a regular uniform, not the SWARM-inspired magical shape-shifting backpack uniform. We already knew that Chika wasn't going to wear it; Key came up with the idea of a manager whose job was, basically, to get Chika where she needed to be (whether that meant whacking monsters with sticks or posing for promotional photoshoots), who had been Mariya's manager as well, and was very attached to all of the official Maria paraphernalia, and very shocked and annoyed that Chika wasn't interested in looking the part. Which is why there are a couple of doodles up there of him chasing Chika down, uniform in hand.

And last there's the Maji Co. logo. That one took a while to work out. We wanted it to look like a heart; we wanted it to look like an M; we wanted it to resemble the kanji for "protect" or "defend". I guess we got two out of three. You can also see where we were trying to create a title that incorporated katakana as well as the English alphabet. An early version of the cover has another attempt at that, but we eventually abandoned the idea.

And that's it for now! After our hiatus, Maria will return with chapter six in March of 2019. You may see some progress updates on my art blog before then, and you'll definitely see some non-Maria projects during the hiatus. Thanks for reading, and see you next year!